Pianist puts his finger on big fear
Most concert pianists will tell you that their greatest fear is damaging their hands, jeopardising not just their career but their essential means of expression.
Chinese superstar Lang Lang used to say the same. Now 36 and possibly the most celebrated pianist living, he believes a far greater loss would be to fall out of love with music-making, with the piano itself.
“You don’t want to have a mental breakdown,” he says. “Because as a pianist you have to keep the fire, keep the passion. I see musicians who just don’t want to play a concert any more. Whether you are scared or annoyed or bored, if you lose interest, that’s the most serious thing.”
Lang Lang himself took a much-needed break in 2017 after developing tendonitis in his left arm. He says the rest, which ended up lasting 15 months, deepened his love for music.
“Now when I play a sonata, I feel better, I feel deeper. I think I needed a little intermission in my career.”
He walked in the park, met friends, got fit and thought about his future. When he returned to the concert hall in July last year, he felt like a newborn baby. It was to a much-reduced schedule. He is now doing 70 recitals a year instead of 130, with three days between concerts instead of one: “This will give me time to heal, mentally and physically.”
The Lang Lang CV still astonishes. Inspired by watching Tom and Jerry’s cartoon escapades in The Cat Concerto, featuring Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 , he started playing the piano at 3. He gave his first public recital, aged 5, in his hometown of Shenyang, China.
“The stage felt like a sweet home to me,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography Journey of a Thousand Miles.
“Right at that moment I decided to be a concert pianist.”
His father sacrificed everything to make it happen. He gave up his police job and moved with his son, when he was 9, to Beijing, so that Lang Lang might have the chance of studying at the Central Music Conservatory. Father and son lived hand-to-mouth in Beijing while Lang Lang’s mother worked in Shenyang as a telephone operator to pay for his music lessons.
At 10, the boy entered the Conservatory. By 13, he had won the Tchaikovsky International Young Musicians’ Competition. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia he studied under Gary Graffman, the country’s leading music professor, and became a star at 17 when he performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Lang Lang has used his subsequent fame and fortune — he is said to be worth £22 million ($42.5m) — to bring music into the lives of children through the Lang Lang International Music Foundation, through two piano academies in China, masterclasses and a series of books on the piano.
The “Lang Lang Effect” is said to have produced 60 million aspiring young pianists in China alone: “The passion is incredible.”
He has a huge young fan base — 239,000 followers on Instagram and 14 million on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter.
Lang Lang’s hands are so precious as to be almost uninsurable. “I don’t play very dangerous sports. I put gloves on, keep my hands warm . . . try not to fight people.”
Some critics feel his extravagant stage style can get in the way of nuance and subtlety, but he says it is just his way of expressing himself— and has been since he was a boy.
“I am quite a physical player, and I feel pretty good about it. I am not a stone, I am a musician.”
Able to fill concert halls all over the world, he is reportedly paid up to £170,000 ($330,000) for private recitals and has homes in New York, Paris and Beijing.
Lang Lang bridges East and West with an eclectic repertoire that encompasses film soundtracks, new works, Chinese music, as well as the great Western classical canon. Though he has no desire to become a crossover artist, he doesn’t look down on others who are.
“I don’t believe classical music should be played for what you call an elite. The ‘elite’ also like to listen to rap.”
I am quite a physical player, and I feel pretty good about it. I am not a stone, I am a musician. Lang Lang, piano superstar